This week’s Digital Content Expo at Miraikan is one of the less corporate tech shows on the Tokyo calendar, so it’s no surprise to see some pretty kooky engineering like the Funbrella from a grad-student team at Osaka University.

When I visited NTT last October for a private demo of its new cellphone RFID loyalty-card system, it was still in its early stages of development, so there wasn’t a great deal to write home about at the time.

Details are scarce on this one, but sources in Japan are reporting that Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings is seriously engaged in research that aims to move the chemical industry away from oil dependence towards a future based on something altogether more illuminating.

Hydrogen fuel cells are clearly a great idea, but the fact that much of the gas that goes into them still comes from fossil fuels is a bit of a problem. That’s why researchers are looking at alternative sources of hydrogen from substances as diverse as dough and sewage.

A signature on a piece of paper in Japan this week means that the country can now start work on commercializing a new generation of high-tech trains that make the current bullet trains look like pedal-bikes.

We don’t have any photos of this for you yet and if we did it wouldn’t really help, so it’s going to have to suffice if we tell you that Panasonic claims it has just created the world’s first 3D HD plasma home cinema system.

Personally, I think Panasonic‘s DSM-Hand is cool not because it can grab a glass without either dropping it or breaking it (I can do that sometimes), but because it uses gears instead of motors to drive its joints.

Not satisfied with a future vision that already includes flexible screens and wafer-thin phones, a pair of Japanese companies has pushed the envelope to come up with far-fetched gadgets that do all of the above without ever going near a power socket.

Should Homer Simpson ever try to smuggle his unqualified identical twin brother into work in his stead, a new biometric identification system that will be used to secure nuclear plants is sure to prompt a “D’oh!” or seven.

We recently lifted the lid on just how useful – not to mention pervasive – RFID technology is in Japan, so it’s with a glad heart that we bring you news of a move that’s sure to help it spread more quickly in the West.

The field of disability aids has seen many devices controlled by computers that visually track the eye movements of paralysed people, but none that reads the electricity given off by swiveling eyeballs.

Flat-panel displays are so mainstream these days they have an entire massive exhibition dedicated to them – the Display Expo in Tokyo. That’s where the technologies we’re likely to see in the shops over the next few years get an early airing, and we were there last month.

Most of the breakthroughs in high-speed data connections that we hear about are of purely theoretical value in the short term, but Oki Japan seems set to buck the trend by committing to making its latest technology commercial in the near future.

If you happen to stop over at Kita Kyushu airport in the southwest of Japan this month, don’t be surprised if the porter offering to carry your bags is a four-foot green chap with an oddly metallic voice.

As we’ve mentioned in the past, the new breed of OLED televisions represented by Sony’s XEL-1 have plenty of assets, but an active lifespan shorter than that of LCD or plasma screens isn’t one of them.

If you’ve ever had the misfortune to dial into a virtual private network (VPN) for a spot of long-distance telecommuting, you’ll doubtless be overjoyed to hear of a new technique that gives the slowcoach technology a boot up the backside.

The idea of a far-distant future where we can upload our very essence to some digital repository in the ether is both compelling and repulsive in equal measure, but a less sci-fi alternative may be closer than we think.